Deutsche Börse: Building transparent master data architecture for centralized master data governance
Explore Deutsche Börse’s journey with SAP
When international market infrastructure and exchange organization Deutsche Börse Group migrated to SAP S/4HANA hosted on Google Cloud Platform, it advanced its data maintenance capabilities at the same time. The SAP Master Data Governance application now serves as its centralized data foundation, removing friction from customer onboarding processes.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Banking | Frankfurt, Germany | 13,000 employees | Accenture |
faster to replicate data to downstream systems.
of manual data maintenance processes eliminated.
Head of Customer Care and Financial Core – Director (SVP) Corporate IT, Deutsche Börse Group
Creating a consistent and centralized data model organization-wide
Tracing its origins to 1585, Deutsche Börse Group is an international exchange organization and innovative market infrastructure provider, committed to transparent, reliable, and stable capital markets. Offering electronic trading systems for buying and selling securities, its products, services, and technologies support safe and efficient markets for sustainable economies. Its subsidiary Clearstream runs one of the world’s leading business-to-business (B2B) banks in Luxembourg.
Deutsche Börse’s business areas cover the financial market value chain from pretrade to trade and posttrade, including the provision of indexes, data, and analytical solutions as well as admission, trading, and clearing. The organization also provides services for funds, the settlement and custody of financial instruments, and the management of collateral and liquidity. And as a technology company, it develops advanced IT solutions and offers IT systems all over the world.
With a strategic imperative to move its business operations to the cloud, Deutsche Börse embarked on a wholesale digital transformation program, investing in SAP S/4HANA with Google Cloud Platform as its hyperscaler partner. This transformation project encompassed a new chart of accounts and parallel ledger and reporting compliance, as well as business process modernization and automation. It also laid the foundation for integrating innovative technologies such as generative AI. Given the project’s scale and complexity, Markus Buschky, Deutsche Börse’s head of customer care and financial core – director (SVP) corporate IT, noted the most challenging part of the project involved the data transformation stream: “The cleansing of data from the old system to the new environment was the most challenging part of the entire project in terms of scope.”
Head of Customer Care and Financial Core – Director (SVP) Corporate IT, Deutsche Börse Group
Rethinking workflow processes for data maintenance and distribution
When it came to creating a consistent and harmonized strategy for managing its master data, the SAP Master Data Governance application was the obvious choice for Deutsche Börse. Helping the organization clean up duplicate legacy data, the central master data maintenance application supports high data quality and standardized business rules for the creation of one source of truth. With the decision to migrate to SAP S/4HANA, it made sense for the data transformation and migration team to implement the application in parallel with its migration.
Kevin Floeh, Deutsche Börse’s head of corporate master data IT, explains, “As we were introducing a parallel ledger, we needed to change data models in terms of core finance data but also core master data for business partners. This required merging business partner data from multiple disparate legacy systems and cleaning up duplicates, so it made sense to change master data maintenance at the same time.”
For the implementation, Deutsche Börse worked with Accenture, recognizing the global consulting giant’s proven experience consolidating master data with SAP Master Data Governance. It also collaborated with experts from the Data Management and Landscape Transformation team, accessing expertise on demand to resolve the specific challenge of migrating from the legacy ERP application to SAP S/4HANA. Initially, Deutsche Börse implemented data governance and consolidation features, while plans are now in place to roll out data quality management.
Head of Corporate Master Data IT, Deutsche Börse Group
Replicating business-critical data in minutes instead of days
Having created a significant scope for the master data management project, the adoption of SAP Master Data Governance gives Deutsche Börse a unified and trusted view of business partner data, paving the way for a true lead-to-cash process. The creation of consistent and tightly controlled workflow processes for data maintenance and distribution allows Deutsche Börse to quickly replicate data to its downstream business processes and systems, including its B2B bank subsidiaries.
By eliminating manual data maintenance practices, the organization can now replicate data in its downstream systems in just seven minutes when previously it could take up to seven days to replicate a full data set. This represents a considerable improvement in Deutsche Börse’s time-to-market standing and smooths the flow of information across the various areas of the company because it is using the same data across its systems.
The centralized data model also allows Deutsche Börse to quickly identify gaps in the quality and consistency of legacy data, enabling it to focus on enriching that data. As an example, Deutsche Börse is redesigning how it onboards clients using a combination of the new data set integrated with stored legacy data. This gives the organization flexibility in terms of process design, but also in how fast it can replicate data to onboard clients. With the centralized data model, it can reduce the time it takes for a client to open an account from months to days. This has the potential to improve customer satisfaction and speed time to revenue.
Head of Corporate Master Data IT, Deutsche Börse Group
Continuing to improve data quality rules and performance
While Deutsche Börse is currently using SAP Master Data Governance for business partner data, it is looking to extend its use to customer and vendor master data. The company is also planning to take advantage of defining data quality rules and data quality key performance indicators for business partner master data.
There is also interest in adopting more automation features within SAP Master Data Governance beyond prepopulating fields based on certain rules.
As part of its digital transformation and migration to advanced ERP, Deutsche Börse adopted a powerful suite of SAP software. This includes SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass solutions, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), and the SAP Analytics Cloud solution. It also adopted the SAP Customer Experience portfolio for sales and service scenarios with several thousand users.
The organization is already moving toward adopting the planning capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud to further simplify and automate planning and forecasting activities. It is also looking to extend the core functionalities of SAP S/4HANA with other SAP and third-party cloud solutions.
Featured partner
Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps leading businesses, governments, and other organizations build and optimize their digital operations, accelerate revenue growth, and enhance citizen services. With proven expertise implementing SAP Master Data Governance, it helped create an integrated data model spanning business processes and applications for one version of the truth.